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Goodreads has a scanner in their app (on iOS/Android) that can scan covers although for some reason it automagically adds those books into a "to-read" shelf but I guess this isn't a problem for you if you create an account for the purpose.

The API is severely rate-limited (1rps), non-standard oath and badly documented, but you should be able to get some xml out of it and parse that however you'd like.

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I'm wondering about the option of having a (cheap, not worth stealing) smartphone, with the Goodreads app on it, logged in to the Goodreads account for this place. People who come in are asked to use it to scan 10 books, and move them over to the "scanned and catalogued" shelves, in addition to paying the $1 fee to get a book. Most people would be fine with that, and over time you get it all scanned.

Goodreads cannot recognize anything, but since it works on either book cover or barcode it will work on lots.

Also, you can download the book information in a CSV format.

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